Netlog

» see netlog.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

netlog never reached me. in 2007 i was on msn messenger every night talking to friends from university, and the social-network slot in turkey was already taken by hi5 for the school kids and facebook for the next wave. netlog was a belgian product, a multi-language european web service that scaled across central and southern europe and never really made it across into the turkish market in volume.

lorenz bogaert and toon coppens launched it in ghent in 1999 as asl.to, a name straight out of the age-sex-location prompt from irc and aim culture. by 2002 they had renamed it to redbox, and around 2006 they renamed it again to netlog. the rebranding worked. over the next four years the user base scaled to roughly 94 million registered accounts across more than twenty languages. by 2010 it was one of the largest social networks in continental europe outside of the anglo-facebook envelope.

then facebook arrived in europe in serious volume. by 2012 most of netlog's eu countries had defaulted to facebook for friend graphs, and netlog's traffic curve bent down. january 2011 the parent company became massive media. they launched twoo.com the same year as a dating-discovery sibling, and through 2013 and 2014 they shifted product weight from netlog to twoo. the netlog brand was effectively turned off in 2015 and the domain redirected. in july 2018 users got notified about a 2012 security breach that had compromised logins and passwords, the kind of cleanup that only happens once a product's books are being closed for good.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

netlog filled the european-language gap that early facebook ignored. you could sign up in any of twenty-plus european languages, from flemish to turkish, and most of those locales had their own discovery and friend graph. the indonesian and brazilian instances had their own subcultures separate from the dutch-speaking belgian core. it was a social network with no single dominant language, the way most european products of that era ended up structuring themselves.

~ what killed it ~

facebook. the conventional answer to every late-2000s european social network's cause of death is facebook, and netlog was not an exception. through 2010 and 2011, european users started defaulting to facebook because their non-european friends were on facebook, and a social network without cross-continent reach was structurally fragile. netlog's response was to spin out twoo as a dating product, where the value was not in friend graph but in matching strangers. that worked better as a business, but it was a different category.

the official wind-down happened during 2015, and users were redirected to twoo. massive media kept twoo running into the 2020s.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »